The interview: Michael Clark

He was the 80s enfant terrible who fell into depression and heroin addiction in the 90s. Now 47, the charismatic ballet star is back at the Edinburgh Festival this month for the first time in 21 years with a new work inspired by his 70s idols David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. If only he dared have a drink to celebrate, he tells Lynn Barber.

Last time I ran into Michael Clark he was sticking cigarettes on gnomes for Sarah Lucas. She had a big cigarette period a few years ago when she covered all her sculptures in Marlboros, and she'd enlisted Clark, a friend, because he was out of work and needed the money, to do the sticking. But he wasn't good enough, by her demanding standards - "She's incredibly precise, the way she does things: she'll take some tobacco out to make the cigarette bend without breaking it" - so his career as a cigarette-sticker petered out. Anyway, Sarah was always urging him to get back to choreography - she coaxed him through one of his crises of confidence by telling him, "Why don't you just try and make the worst ballet you possibly could? How bad can it get?", and he is eternally grateful. Clark seems happy to rave about Sarah Lucas till the cows come home: I have to keep reminding him this interview is meant to be about him. But he is absolutely hopeless at blowing his own trumpet.

We met at the St John Bar around teatime, and he started off so mumbly and incoherent I wondered if he'd been permanently damaged by all his years of drug abuse, but then he had two espressos and a cappuccino and perked up. He is still beautiful at 47, a gentle skinhead with a nappy pin through his ear, though he is beginning to get that slightly exaggerated puppet look that old pop stars get. As he says, "It's very difficult for a trained dancer to look like a normal person. They walk differently." I see what he means when he goes to the bar to order drinks - he leans diagonally along the counter and points his leg out behind in an arabesque, and a couple of straight men nearby eye him warily.

Anyway, he is back working, that's the main thing. At one stage, in the mid-90s, he disappeared so completely that rumours swept around London that he had died, perhaps of Aids, perhaps of drugs. He was the boy from nowhere - in fact, a farm near Aberdeen - who went to his sister's Scottish dance classes when he was four, and ended up the brightest star of the Royal Ballet School. But then, to the grief of his teachers, he refused to join the Royal Ballet company and instead went to the Ballet Rambert and then the American Karole Armitage company. At 22, he founded his own company and spewed out an incredible stream of new works throughout the 80s, with titles such as No Fire Escape in Hell, Because we Must and I am Curious, Orange. He was the punk choreographer who strapped dildos on his dancers and had Leigh Bowery staggering across the stage in 10in heels with a chainsaw. The ballet world deplored such gimmickry but still admired the beauty of his choreography. He won commissions from the Paris Opera, Scottish Ballet, Deutsche Oper, and was just embarking on a major work for the Royal Ballet when, in 1994, he disappeared.

He came back in the early Noughties, when he created a work called Before and After: The Fall featuring a giant wanking arm sculpture by Sarah Lucas. From 2005-7 he was artistic associate at the Barbican and developed three new Stravinsky ballets, his versions of Apollo (O), The Rite of Spring (Mmm...) and Les Noces (I do). These were hailed as signs of a new maturity, a return to his classical roots. But his new work uses music by David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop - "the holy trinity of rock" - which is bound to upset the purists. He unveiled the first piece, Thank U Ma'am, at the Venice Biennale, and will be showing it at the Edinburgh Festival at the end of this month, but he says it's still a work in progress. He wants to include a backdrop of Bowie's original video of Heroes so that it looks as if Bowie is onstage with the dancers, but he hasn't got the scale right yet. Anyway, it's a change from Stravinsky. "For myself, for the audience, for the dancers, I felt we needed something different... To be honest, it's more simple, musically, and that gives me a kind of freedom."

The artist Elizabeth Peyton, who saw an early version at the Galway Festival, told me: "It was brilliant and electrifying, all of it. There is something in most all of Michael's work where he innovates from within the tradition of dance using contemporary references. These new Bowie pieces seem something like a miracle in how they are so alive, huge in feeling and so part of our time, and I think this is because they come from so deep inside Michael. He seems to focus closer, closer, closer to the thing that makes him live in a way that is impossible not to feel as a viewer."

The work includes a solo for him - "But only because the dancers need to change costumes!" he says - and it is a "pedestrian" piece. At 47, he says, he can't really dance any more, except when he's showing his dancers new moves. "I can't just sit in a chair and choreograph. But I couldn't sustain it for an evening, as they do." He has had five knee operations and has learned his limitations. "It's sad, of course it's sad, but at least I can still choreograph."

He would love it if David Bowie came to see the work, but he's never met him, and is not sure he wants to. "Maybe it's better just to let the fantasy live on." Bowie meant an awful lot to him when he was a boy growing up in Scotland because, "I'd seen this man on Top of the Pops put his arm round another man and I thought, 'O my goodness, there are other people like me! Maybe. Somewhere.' And I felt I had to understand what it was all about. It's unbelievable to think now that that was such a provocative gesture but I don't think I'd ever seen that before in my life." Had he even heard of people being gay? "Not then. I must have been nine or something. I think maybe I'd touched tongues with my best friend, that was all." Later, when he knew he was gay, he plucked up courage to tell his mother and she said "Don't worry, I won't tell anyone!", which rather missed the point of coming out.

He is still extremely close to his mother, Bessie, and hopes she will be well enough to attend his Edinburgh premiere. Back in the 80s he actually had her perform on stage, bare-breasted, giving birth to him in his ballet O. She toured with the company for two years, and loved it. "It was a great way to spend time together and for her to see what was going on. I remember my nephew came home from school and said someone had said to him, 'Is it true your granny's a stripper and your uncle's a poofter?' That's when it dawned on me that things that I say or do have repercussions for other people. I didn't realise that my poor nephew was going to be picked on. But when he asked that question I said, 'Yes, it's true!'"

He wears a big silver ring saying "Dad", but his feelings towards his father, Bill, who died when he was 18, are more ambivalent. He was a farmer who hated farming; he was also a gambler and a drunk. Clark remembers him as an entertaining drunk, "a bit like Hurricane Higgins", who would run through the room naked with a banana tied to his penis, but he also remembers how his hand used to shake in the mornings as he raised the first drink to his lips. And then - this is something Clark has not spoken about before - he committed suicide in the most painful way possible, by drinking weedkiller. "I was 18 when he died and I'd been fascinated by suicides like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. I thought it was a respect-worthy thing to do - why shouldn't one end one's life when one wanted to? But then when it really happened, with my Dad, it put me off altogether. Anyone who's experienced that in a family would never do it because it's such a loaded thing."

But for some years, in the late 80s, early 90s, it seemed that Michael Clark was bent on self-destruction by other means. He dabbled in drugs and was caught glue-sniffing while he was at ballet school, but he knew they would never expel him because he was their star pupil. "And when I first danced at the school on speed, I remember knowing I felt amazing, but also knowing it was the drug - I wasn't suddenly an amazing dancer." But he was always looking for mind-altering experiences. "I was misled into believing that as an artist you were meant to explore different states and report back to normal people. Something a bit ridiculous like that. And I thought if I was going to dance on heroin, it wasn't enough just to take it, I had to become an addict. It was just because I was curious, really. I wanted to find out. And I didn't believe you could find out by reading about things, or believing whatever people told you, it seemed to me you had to experience it. But I didn't know that the whole narcotics thing was such a long process. I thought that once you'd taken it three days in a row, you were an addict and had to keep taking it every day. But then it took years really."

Everything came to a head in 1994. He was deep into drugs, depressed by a knee injury and the death of Leigh Bowery, he'd split up with his boyfriend, choreographer Stephen Petronio, and he'd flunked out of choreographing a new work for the Royal Ballet because "I got to the point where I just couldn't make decisions - it was beyond Stanley Kubrick - and the dancers were getting very, very frustrated, so I had to withdraw." He fled to Cairnbulg, near Fraserburgh, to live with his mother - he only learned later that Fraserburgh is the heroin capital of Britain - and disappeared for four years. For the first six months he didn't leave his room. "I could hear human activity outside and I hoped I could be part of it again some time but I knew I wasn't ready. But I'm lucky in that I knew my talent hadn't gone away - that was always my anchor. And by chance I met two artists living nearby who said they'd moved there for the light. I thought, light? I couldn't see any light. But we became great friends and used to go on adventures together, so I was very fortunate in that way. It was a strange time."

He says coming off heroin was relatively easy; it was his much longer addiction to methadone (prescribed as a heroin substitute) that was the real problem. "It was hard for me because I loved it. And it suited me because I'm a control freak and at least I knew what I was getting. But I kept getting more and more of it and it must have changed everything about me for a time. I had no sensitivities to anyone or anything whatsoever. And I probably damaged my body quite a lot. Sometimes I'd injure myself and it felt interesting, you know? Because you have no feelings, no pain. During the methadone years - as I now refer to them - I would try and drink myself to sleep but I couldn't. And then, before I knew it, I was drinking in the morning, taking the first drink of the day with a shaking hand. Which was an awful thing, when I'd grown up seeing my father like that."

What saved him in the end was going back to his old Royal Ballet School teacher, Richard Glasstone, and taking private lessons. "That was great. I don't think either of us were under any illusions that I was going to be like the 13-year-old he taught, but it was almost like a sped-up version of being taught by him in the first place, and the work that we did probably reflected a cautious re-entering of the world." Another reason for re-entering the world was that in 1998 his mother announced that she was getting married again - to her first husband. She was married to him for just a day before he went off to fight in the war, but while he was away she had a child by someone else, and he divorced her. But in 1998 she found him again and they had a few happy years together before he died. Michael saw her marriage as a sign that she believed he could cope on his own.

He is evasive when I ask if he will ever take drugs again. "I can't really answer that - it's an ongoing thing. My mum says: 'Just wait till I'm dead till you do drugs again.' She asked me if I was going to be all right, and I am, I will be all right. But like anything new, it feels different, you know? If you're used to having something, you sort of miss that support. I don't even drink now. Not at all. But I miss things about it - the bonding with your colleagues after a performance, when you've gone through this experience together which is almost life-changing - and it still feels a bit strange. Rescue Remedy is as far as I go - I think it's got drops of brandy in it."

One regret about his methadone years is that he forgot to keep up payments on the storage unit in London that contained all his costumes, souvenirs and notebooks, so they were seized and auctioned off. He has always been useless with money. Three years ago art gallery owner Sadie Coles had to organise a big auction of artworks donated by his friends (Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Anish Kapoor) to keep his dance company going. For the past three years, while he was doing the Stravinsky Project, he was supported by the Barbican, and given a flat there, but he says he's lost the flat now because there were complaints about noise. He has a year's grant and sponsorship for his present work but no idea what will happen after that.

The trouble with choreography, he says, is that there's no sellable end-product. "But that's the beauty of it really! I always hope it might change but it's still an ongoing struggle. And any money that I raise goes back into the work. But those dancers I work with are an investment really. The knowledge that they carry in their bodies - you can't put a price on that."

He is looking forward to showing his new work at the Edinburgh Festival. It will be his first time there since 1988. "If I look at the work then and look at the work now, I can feel OK, things have moved on. I wouldn't show now what I showed then. That was an excessive time, in terms of the costuming and the theatricality - I find it kind of obscene. Whereas this one I hope is all about the choreography and not the extraneous stuff." He talks a lot about his admiration for Frederick Ashton, and says he has a dancer in his present company, now in his early 50s, who used to be Ashton's muse. "I just want him around to teach us, because I want my dancers to understand Ashton's épaulement - the use of the shoulders, use of the back - because it's becoming extinct and I really want that to be passed on. I love Ashton's work and those were the roles I fantasised about doing - there was a very fast solo in Enigma Variations which I would have loved to do."

So does he ever regret not joining the Royal Ballet? "No! For the few times I would have been able to do the roles that I wanted, there were other things I would have had to do that I didn't want. I knew what my life would be like if I joined that company and it wasn't for me, it really wasn't. So I have no regrets there. And I'd tasted something I didn't understand. That was always the thing with me - finding the next thing to understand. But I'd still like to have danced those Ashton solos."

• Michael Clark's new work is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh 28-31 Aug and then 28 Oct-Nov 7 at the Barbican, London EC2

Step by stepLife story

1962 Born in Kintore, Scotland. Begins dance lessons at four.

1975 Enters London's Royal Ballet School.

1979 Joins Ballet Rambert.

1980 His father commits suicide.

1982 Choreographs first piece at London's Riverside Studios.

1984 Launches Michael Clark Company.

1986 No Fire Escape in Hell features Leigh Bowery in 10-inch heels with a chainsaw.

1988 Heroin addiction forces Clark, aged 26, into a form of retirement.